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Geez, the bridge is in Brooklyn.

Do your due diligence, for Pete's sake, willya?

Don't forget New York and Ney Jersey. No comparison to Kashmir.

http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/liberty/eiowner. htm

Uhh... what?

So a little over 46 years after humankind first broke free from the gravity well by launching a basketball into orbit we're supposed to have mastered spaceflight? That's like complaining that the first boats we made weren't very safe.

We live in an age where (at least in the developed world) terrible epidemic diseases have been wiped from the planet. Smallpox has been eliminated entirely, polio is headed in that direction. Cars have become incredibly safe even in the last 30 years with the development of airbags, safety glass, 3 point seatbelts, etc. We can perform amazing operations and save people from cancer, heart disease, etc. Hell, we can even cure minor annoyances like going bald to some degree.

I guess the logical thought that some people have is that _everything_ should be safe, and easily fixable. Even bolting yourself to more than a million pounds of explosives, then later re-entering the earths atmosphere at 20,000 MPH should be safe as kittens.

Listen buddy, going into space is inherently dangerous. It's the most dangerous environment we've yet been too. Given that the failure rate is ONLY 2% is pretty amazing. Are there safer ways to do it? Maybe, the space plane idea might just work, but that only makes the first part of the equasion safer. Re-entering the earths atmosphere is just a difficult thing to do since you're relying on the atmoshere to slow you down. Try to put things into a little perspective. Good god, 27 people died building the Brooklynn Bridge alone!

If you think the X-Prize is going to be some magic bullet that makes going into space any _safer_, think again. The goal of the X-Prize is to make going into space _cheaper_. My guess is that it's also going to make it more dangerous, along with cheaper. That's fine.. as more people do it, and everything becomes more perfected the safety will go up.

Life is dangerous. If you want to complain about spending too much money on getting little benefit, fine. But this "safety to the astronauts" argument is just moronic. The astronauts aren't idiots, and know the dangers. Let them take those risks and stop second guessing them.

--at least, not in the sense of building it the same way, even approximately the same way, as it was before.

Why does anyone think that we would try to rebuild exact copies of any other monument?

Surely the emotional resonance of these monuments comes from the knowledge that they ARE original to the time in which they were built. How could a replica arouse any more genuine feeling than those in Las Vegas or Japan?

If I was French, I'd certainly be burning US flags.

I'd want my fucking statue back too.

Actually, at one time, it was expected that for every million dollars you spent on a construction project you would lose one worker. This was sort of a rule of thumb. You can take a look at the brooklyn bridge casualty list as an example here.

Yes, it is stupid, but the statue of liberty is made of copper and steel. So, thanks for playing, we've got a nice parting gift for you.

Statue of Liberty Facts

Weight of copper used in Statue: 179,200 pounds (81,300 kilograms)
Weight of steel used in Statue: 250,000 pounds (113,400 kilograms)
Total weight of Statue: 450,000 pounds (225 tons)
Thickness of Copper sheeting: 3/32 inch (2.37mm)

Disclaimer: I am a DSL product manager for a non-free ISP. But this also means I have seen some of the economics (like, it costs money...) of DSL.